Very true. As someone above mentioned "They are only humans who have bills to pay". Liked your idea of reading historical books \ autobiographies too. Honestly I beleive that more than all these self-help books, the world probably needs a big wiki page of "what worked for me" where real people add small ideas of the things that worked for them improve some aspect of life so that other help seekers have a free collection of ideas to explore , experiment and find out what might work for them instead of haplessly funding the egos and pockets of these greedy self-help gurus.